Revisiting Generative Replay for Class Incremental Object Detection

Generative replay has gained significant attention in class-incremental learning; however, its application to Class Incremental Object Detection (CIOD) remains limited due to the challenges in generating complex images with precise spatial arrangements. In this study, motivated by the observation that the forgetting of prior knowledge is predominantly present in the classification sub-task as opposed to the localization sub-task, we revisit the generative replay method for class incremental object detection. Our method utilize a standard Stable Diffusion model to generate image-level replay data for all old and new tasks. Accordingly, the old detector and a stage-wise detector are conducted on the synthetic images respectively to determine the bounding box positions through pseudo-labeling. Furthermore, we propose to use a Similarity-based Cross Sampling mechanism to select more valuable confusing data between old and new tasks to more effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting and reduce the false alarm rate for the new task. Finally, all synthetic and real data are integrated for current-stage detector training, where the images generated for previous tasks are highly beneficial in minimizing the forgetting of existing knowledge, while those synthesized for the new task can help bridge the domain gap between real and synthetic images. We conducted extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO benchmark datasets in multiple settings to showcase the efficacy of our proposed approach, which achieves state-of-the-art results.